Israelites Research Paper

2. Why did the Israelites begin their story with the Exodus? Throughout the Old Testament, the one theme that continually appears is the Exodus (Tullock & McEntire, 2012, pg. 4). However, this was the supreme event in Israelite history. Israel becomes a people of God through

According to the textbook, Premodern Judaism started with the help of the “myth of history” because history has to begin somewhere. Judiasm started when God made promises to Abraham. Moses helped people escape from slavery and took them to the “land of promise”. This is where Judiasm really starts and the “myths of history” flourished. The “myths of history” tells how God acts in time. Judaism developed through the experiences of Egyptian and Babylonian civilizations. These stories are told throughout time and are the center of Judaism. This is why Judaism is considered to be unique. The stories of Moses

To study Genesis in terms of its literary and historical content is not to say that we are in any way being irreverent in our reading of this part of the Old Testament. In other words, it is possible to read Genesis in both a spirit of appreciation for its position as the opening exegetical narrative of the Bible and as a document that reflects literary and historical realities and influences during the time when it was being written down. This paper examines some of the contemporary sources that influenced the two sets of writers who recorded the events of Genesis.

Judaism being the oldest out of these three dominant religions was developed in the “third millennium BCE” (130). Canaan is where the Hebrews first prospered, until around 1500 BCE. At this time a famine struck, and influenced the Jewish people to move to Egypt. Egypt was lead by the Hyksos, which shared languages and cultural beliefs with the Hebrews. In Egypt “the Hebrews thrived over the next few centuries, until the Egyptian overthrew the Hyksos and enslaved the Hebrews” (130). At that time Moses (a man lead by God), rallied the Hebrews and helped them escape the slavery they endured in Egypt.

• Wrote about Jewish wars that have corroborated by other historians and archaeological excavations. Pg. 81

The Israelite civilization dates back to between 1300 and 1200 BCE when they settled in Canaan from Mesopotamia. This was considered their homeland. The Israelites developed from the Cannanites, since their civilizations began together along with the Jebusites. They faced a lot of struggles, but after migrating to Egypt, and being separated into two kingdoms, they kept the faith that they would someday return to their homeland. The greatest achievements of the Israelites was their architecture, monotheistic religion, Ten Commandments, and their military. However, they were not enough to save the civilization. They fell due to the decline in leadership within the civilization, and attacks and conquest from the Assyrians and Babylonians.

15. What were the three major groups of Israelites that formed in the wake of the Babylonian destruction, and how were they related to each other?

Joseph M. Bolton RELS 103-02 Online Old Testament Studies Spring Semester 2011 Session E May 8, 2011 to July 2, 2011 The Old Testament TimeLine Creation & Primeval History The Creation: * God creates the Heavens and the Earth * God creates man in his image. *

The Israelites possessed little worldly power or wealth, but they created a powerful religion, known as Judaism which is a form of

Now that we have been introduced to similarities that exist between what we find within the Old Testament, and what we find from the Ancient Near East, we must know explore what specifically the similarities are, as well as finding some differences among them. First, we should start by comparing the origin stories found in Genesis 1-11, and their ANE counterparts. The Mesopotamian Enuma Elish starts off by describing a cosmic conflict that is occurring between two deities, Marduk and Tiamat. After killing the evil Tiamat, Marduk uses her carcass to create heaven and earth, and then, with help from his father, uses her and her co-conspirator’s blood to create humankind to do the hard labor on the earth. Coming from an Old Testament background, we can infer that the conflict between Marduk and Tiamat points to Cain and Abel the first murder, as well as Adam and Eve, where the women, Eve, first partakes in the sin which eventually brings evil into the world. In addition, the fact of human kind being the labor force on earth refers to God’s creation of Adam and His curse to him saying he would have to work the land in order to

John H. Walton’s Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament: Introducing the Conceptual World of the Hebrew Bible is broken up into fourteen chapters. Those fourteen chapters are each part of one of five sections. This book also contains over twenty historical images. Before the introduction, the author gives readers a full appendix of all images used in this published work. The author then gives his acknowledgements followed by a list of abbreviations.

Studying the religion of the Ancient Israelite People must be done in a careful manner. The ways in which biblical scholars frame significant ideas can have a major effect on how their point is received. Today’s ideas about the religious lives of Canaanites have been drawn on primarily from The Hebrew Bible and archaeological evidence. In their respective works, biblical scholars Benjamin Sommer and Carol Meyers choose to interpret these pieces of religious evidence is varying ways; Meyers takes a more cultural approach while Sommer’s has a theological leaning. Recognizing these different perspectives, I prefer the approach that Meyers takes because of its focus in anthropology.

The IDB provides a brief overview of Israel’s political setting after the invasions of Assyria in the first century.

“The Pentateuch developed against the background of the Ancient Near Eastern culture first cultivated in and spread by Sumerian, Assyrian, and Babylonian empires”. From this, we can see how Israelite religion was “shaped by responses to and reactions against this culture due both to contacts with neighboring Canaanites and to conflicts with Assyrian and Babylonian

To speak of the Hebrew Scripture is to speak of story, a story stretching from the very beginning of time to only a few centuries before the beginning of the Common Era. It is to speak of richness of content, of purpose and of reality and to engross oneself in an overarching narrative that, depending on your personal convictions, continues to the present day. Within this richness is found a wide variety of different events and experience, told through a series of genre ranging from foundational myth to apocalypse, law giving to poetry, genealogy to wisdom and many more. Within this diversity however, three broad sections can be discerned that speak to a shared purpose and content, these are the sections of Law, Prophecy and Writings. It